EDRC/CROND

NAME

SYNOPSIS

crond -x [ext,sch,proc,pars,load,misc,test,bit]

crond -V

DESCRIPTION

Crond searches edrc/var/spool/cron/ for crontab files which are named after accounts in /etc/passwd. The found crontabs are loaded into the memory. Crond also searches for any files in the edrc/var/spool/cron.d/ directory, which have a different format (see crontab(4)). Crond examines all stored crontabs and checks each job to see if it needs to be run in the current minute. When executing commands, any output is mailed to the owner of the crontab (or to the user specified in the MAILTO environment variable in the crontab, if such exists). Any job output can also be sent to syslog by using the -s option.

Crond checks its crontables' modtimes every minute to check for any changes and reloads the crontables which have changed. There is no need to restart Crond after some of the crontables were modified.

Crond checks these files and directories:

edrc/etc/crontab

system crontab. The the file is empty/not used by default.

edrc/var/spool/cron.d/

directory that contains system cronjobs stored for different users.

edrc/var/spool/cron/

directory that contains user crontables created by the ecrontab command (this is the most commonly used job scheduling method).

Note that the ecrontab(1) command updates the modtime of the spool directory whenever it changes a crontab.

Daylight Saving Time and other time changes

If time was adjusted one hour forward, those jobs that would have run in the interval that has been skipped will be run immediately. Conversely, if time was adjusted backward, running the same job twice is avoided.

Time changes of more than 3 hours are considered to be corrections to the clock or the timezone, and the new time is used immediately.

It is possible to use different time zones for crontables. See crontab(4) for more information.

OPTIONS

-h

Prints a help message and exits.

-i

Disables inotify support (inotify is not compiled in).

-m

This option allows you to specify a shell command to use for sending Crond mail output instead of using sendmail(8) This command must accept a fully formatted mail message (with headers) on standard input and send it as a mail message to the recipients specified in the mail headers. Specifying the string off (i.e., crond -m off) will disable the sending of mail.

-n

Tells the daemon to run in the foreground. This can be useful when starting it out of init.

-f

the same as -n, consistent with other crond implementations.

-p

Allows Crond to accept any user set crontables.

-P

Don't set PATH. PATH is instead inherited from the environment.

-s

This option will direct Crond to send the job output to the system log using syslog(3). This is useful if your system does not have sendmail(8), installed or if mail is disabled.

-x

This option allows you to set debug flags.

-V

Print version and exit.

SIGNALS

CAVEATS

The syslog output will be used instead of mail, when sendmail is not installed.

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR